Thursday, August 25, 2005

iTunes 4.9 Music Videos

UPDATE: See this post to learn why the script no longer works with changes to the iTMS content following the release of iTunes 6.0.

Every time a new version of iTunes is released, Apple changes they way iTunes communicates with the iTunes Music Store usually by changing the encryption keys or methods that the results are encoded with. Then we all have to figure out what's changed and someone usually does. First the pages were gziped, then gziped and encoded with aes-cbc (Rijndael-128) using a static key, then gziped and encoded with aes-cbc using a key that was sent in the response. Now the key is also encrypted. So here for your enlightenment and learned review is some code demonstrating the current iTunes 4.9 communication methods. This example retrieves the link to a QuickTime music video file from the URL copied from iTunes. Remember that... with knowledge comes responsibility.